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Last weekend, I attended an event called “The Great Canadian Tune” as part of the LuminaTO Festival of Arts and Creativity in Toronto. For those of you unaware of the event, it was an attempt at breaking a world record for the world’s largest guitar ensemble ever by playing Neil Young’s classic Helpless in unison.

I used the word attempt for a reason. The group fell 180 participants short of breaking the record. Smoke on the water, played in Leinfelden-Echterdingen, Germany in 2007 remains the world record leader. Go figure.

As a strategist and planner, I couldn’t help but reflect on, what went wrong?

You see, I’m currently in the midst of planning a large user generated content competition for one of our clients, and the parallels between The Great Canadian Tune and the initiative we’re working on are significant. Both projects use a competition framework to increase awareness and interest, both require audience participation in terms of voting and contribution, and both digital and real world components.

Based on the similarities, I figured there was a lot to learn from falling 180 participants short.

Participatory Planning Framework
For any initiative like The Great Canadian Tune, a planner needs to use a sound methodology to frame the event. For any participatory social initiative, I use a variation on the following approach:

•    Clearly articulate the purpose of the initiative,
•    Mobilize a community and gain commitment,
•    Make it simple to participate,
•    Execute flawlessly,

Clearly articulate the purpose of the initiative
Let’s start at the beginning. The Great Canadian Tune started out as a competition to identify Canada’s great song from a list of ten songs that were pre-selected by organizers of the LuminaTO festival. People were encouraged to vote for their favorite from the list, and the winner would be named The Great Canadian Tune. The winning song would then be used for the Guinness Book of World Records attempt for the world’s largest guitar ensemble, which would be played at the end of a concert featuring an unknown band playing a few of their own original songs, followed by the top ten tunes.

Confused yet? To be honest, I’m still trying to figure out what the primary purpose of this entire event really was.

• Was it to get Canada into the Guinness Book? If yes, than organize the entire event to support this one goal. Forget about the song voting and make sure that everyone is crystal clear on the objective.
• Was it to identify Canada’s great tune? If yes, than involve participants the whole way through. Don’t mandate the top 10 Canadian songs – that’s a sure fire way to ensure that no one feels any ownership over the process.
• Was it to have a concert or to promote an unknown band? If yes, make that transparent. Part of my personal disappointment was being forced to sit through a concert I wasn’t expecting. I heard angry participants shouting “corporate sham” after the event because of the lengthy concert with original music.

In planning an event, it is important to have focus. Otherwise, it’s quite difficult to to clearly articulate your event’s story. The Great Canadian Tune organizers should have started out by trying to do one thing well.

Mobilize a community and gain early commitment
The Great Canadian Tune did very little to gain participant commitment in advance of the event. Despite probably having been in the works for some time, there was no early registration that would increase people’s psychological commitment to play in the event. There were no social media groups or challenges (just a “tweet this” feature which, by the way, upon last examination only showed up four times in Twitter search). I’m not saying social media would have made this event successful, but supporting discussion around the event and publicizing event attendance in facebook and Twitter feeds, as well as a mass facebook invite certainly wouldn’t have hurt the event.

I guess what I’m saying is that when it comes to a highly-visible event of this nature, I would do everything I can to pre-ensure success. A Guinness Book attempt event has an air of inevitability. Breaking a world record should not have been an “if”, it should have been a “when”. I would have tried to start the day with a back-pocket participant list of at least 1,000.

How would you do this? Here are my thoughts on a few of the missed opportunities:

• Identify event-aligned sponsorship and leverage their community. Most of the guitar stores in downtown Toronto easily have 500 patrons pass through their doors today. Toronto has a passionate musical culture, and this community should have been front and center in participating. I can tell you that this is a big part of our current competition planning strategy.
• Have people register before the event. While this isn’t a perfect measure of participants who will show, it will at least give you a ballpark. Registration on the LuminaTO site or a facebook event page doesn’t matter – just give individuals a visible (countable) way to indicate their support of the event, and remind them the day before it’s about to take place.
• Estimate attendance in advance. This goes with my last point – it’s much better to know your event is running short on participants a month in advance than an hour before the count. The event organizers claimed that there were several hundred downloads of the sheet music for the event, but that really isn’t a good  estimate of anticipated attendance. Get registration commitment, assume 60% of those people won’t show up, and you’ve got yourself a decent estimate of attendance.
• Turn your spectators into participants. At this event, there were easily 200 non-participating spectators. A few hundred rental guitars on hand could have been the difference between success and failure.

Make it simple to participate
Motivating a crowd to do anything is difficult, so it is important to lower the barriers to participation. In some ways, The Great Canadian Tune got lucky – the selection of Neil Young’s Helpless as the world record attempt song lowered the skill barriers required to participate. A simple three-chord song, Helpless made it easy for a novice to play in the event.  However, other aspects of the record-attempt more than added complexity to the event.

1. The event was difficult to access because of its location. Dundass Square, while a highly transit accessible location, is extremely busy and turns many people off due to its crowded nature and car inaccessibility. LuminaTO turned what could have good record-breaking event into a half day chore because of the amount of effort required to get to its location.
2. The timing was unclear. Register at 2PM. The songs will count down at 4PM. We will play Helpless some time after that. After looking at a number of message boards, many people were turned off by the lack of clarification around timing.
3. There was a lot of competition. LuminaTO (the parent festival) featured several other simultaneous events that would act as competition to The Great Canadian Tune. In addition, there were numerous other events around Toronto. There were easily another 200 other guitar players available at the simultaneous Portuguese Festival taking place that same weekend. People were forced to make a tough choice that day.

In trying to get people to participate in your initiative, it is important to make them as simple as possible to participate in. Every barrier in place takes away from your universe of potential participants. Ultimately, these barriers contributed to the failure to establish a new record.

Execute flawlessly
This goes without saying – but whatever you’re planning needs to go off without a hitch. Unfortunately, The Great Canadian Tune had many. Outside of the failure to break the record, here are a few of the issues:

• The mechanics were broken. Participants in the greater competition felt left out of the song selection process, missing an opportunity for longer term event engagement.
• The communication was poor. I don’t mean the place and time of the event, I mean information associated with the competition. Look through the message board on the Great Canadian Tune site and you’ll see that many interested people couldn’t even find the top ten song list. What’s also interesting is that many of the people I informally polled didn’t hear about the event until after helpless was selected as the winning song.
• There was no real effort to establish camaraderie among participants. Both online and offline, there was no att empt at uniting a community, which would have helped attendance dramatically. Even at the event, there was no encouragement to meet other people or make a new friend. It’s amazing that an event that aimed to create the world’s largest ensemble could seem so lonely.

And perhaps the reason I was so disappointed by the event…

• The event was never able to create that moment. I think everyone went to the event with one shared dream – to experie nce t hat 30 second moment where the entire world is lit up by the chorus of 1,800 guitars and voices playing in unison. What’s funny is that, if I had experienced that thirty seconds, perhaps this blog post would never have been written. Instead, I had to listen to a band drown out 1,600 musicians playing in unison, and the entire event was a giant letdown.

The takeaways from this for me are clear – any competition or event is about the participants, not about the organizers. While a brand or sponsor may have clear communications objectives from the event, ultimately, it’s about the participants. Unless those participants understand the e

vent’s purpose, are mobilized, and are able to participate easily, you may be building an experience with no audience.

And unless the experience is executed flawlessly, expect some harsh criticism.